Somebody writes “LA Weekly Reports: Bradbury still has a lot to say, especially about how people do not understand his most literary work, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953. It is widely taught in junior high and high schools and is for many students the first time they learn the names Aristotle, Dickens and Tolstoy.
Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.”
And you just know
That loads of commentators will say he’s wrong.
The over-investigation of what a poem or story ‘means’ is what screwed up English as a subject for me at school. I always thought that if I ever wrote something I’d include a big section explaining exactly what each bit meant so it couldn’t be subverted!
I think one of the problems he has is that from what I remember the television bit was much smaller in importance as the destroying of books. I can see how people would think that state destruction of books is the dominant theme. Maybe I’m tainted by the film but television still didn’t seem as big a part of their lives as it sounds like it should have been, or indeed is now in real life. Maybe I need to reread the book?